From New Zealand to Australia and back…

From New Zealand to Australia and back…

I spent two whole days being completely green.  The Tasman Sea is hard to handle.  Luckily the crossing only lasts three days.

I have been eating mostly pasta and salad on board as they are the only vegan options available, so when we got to Melbourne, which for some reason has an immense amount of vegan restaurants especially when compared to the rest of Australia, I went crazy!  Jason planned an entire day for us purely around the restaurants where we would be dining.  We made it to one because I ate so much, there was no room in my stomach for any more food!  I had spring rolls and samosas, the vegan nachos and a chocolate cake with soy ice-cream for desert.  Delicious!  I am still craving pizza and cookies and fake sausages (there are no meat substitutes out here…if there are, they are well hidden), but it was wonderful to assuage some of my hunger.

In Sydney, we had an overnight and Jason booked a room for us at the Intercontinental Hotel.  We had a beautiful view of the opera house, the bridge and our boat!  I took a bath and ordered room service!  It was a great night and we got to sleep in the same bed since we’ve been here.  The beds in our room on the ship are bunk-beds and they’re smaller than my dorm bed in college.  It was an awesome mini-vacation.

I still have no idea what day it is or where we are most of the time.  Maybe I’ll get used to it soon, but it seems to me that time will just blur on by (especially during the Tasman Sea crossing, which we just finished again this morning).  I am looking forward to our next trip to Melbourne over Valentine’s Day and I am planning to pace myself so that I can eat multiple vegan meals on shore.  I miss everybody so much, but the internet has been horrible.  Just know that I’m thinking of all of you wishing that you were here!

New Zealand

It’s amazing how easy it is to forget I am on a boat…until the ship starts rocking.  We are currently on our second pass through the Tasman Sea.  It starts out very fun because I love jumping when the ship is on its way down a wave and I can hang suspended in the air for much longer than I should be able to.  This entertains me for about ten minutes before I have to take a sea-sick pill and go to sleep. 

We’ve left New Zealand, but will be coming back.  New Zealand was very lush and green and beautiful and backpacking seems to be highly encouraged.  Every port seemed to have a backpacker welcome sign and every hotel and restaurant caters to them with discounts.  It’s very different from America, where if you see a backpacker you usually assume they are homeless and everyone looks askance at them in stores and restaurants.  Why does no one backpack through America?

I have been trying to collect an item from every region that we visit and I finally settled on an ugly statue of a Kiwi bird with native shells inside of it.  The actual picture of a Kiwi Bird is much more flattering to it than this particular statue, but the statue is so ugly that it’s cute and I couldn’t pass it up. 

I got off of the boat only a few times in New Zealand.  Mostly I made my way out in search of food.  I scored big in Auckland which had a Thai restaurant on every corner.  We had to search a little harder in Dunedin where all of the restaurants seemed to be closed on a Tuesday afternoon.  We found an old hotel on the waterfront that had been converted into a seafood restaurant and luckily had one vegan item on the menu.  Being that it was red curry, I was more than happy to stick around for lunch.  It was delicious.

Other than the distraction of good food, we’ve been reformatting some of our shows to better suit the guests tastes as most of them are more familiar with music from the Mesozoic Period.  I asked Jason how I should finish that sentence and that’s what he came up with.  I love him because he is both hilarious and accurate.  

The passengers on this cruise seem to be enjoying our shows immensely so we know we are heading in the right direction.  Of course, they are mostly American, so our Motown show was met with nostalgia instead of eye-rolling which was great since it’s the first one we put up for all of the cruises.  I do play piano for our old-school Broadway show which has been changed around to incorporate guest suggestions.  I admit that the show is fun and for this cruise it was finally met with the crowd response that it wasn’t long enough and they would like to hear us sing more.  Joy! 

That’s pretty much it.  I have to remind myself to walk outside occasionally and see the world especially on sea days when it’s easy to exist in the bowels of the ship.  Also, yoga on a ship is wonderful.  The waves make you stretch deeper into all stretches and they also offer respite on the way down.  Now if I could only balance…